My dad bought this bike around '76 or '77. I think it had been around a few owners already, it had been pretty heavily trialled and was never in great condition, always hard to start and oiling plugs. We kept it at my granny's and it was great fun to ride it at the weekends when we were down visiting. Of course as a young 10 year old kid I was more interested in doing jumps and pretending I was Evel Knievel than I was perfecting my trials skills. You'll see too that this was long before the days of health and safety, no such thing as proper trials clothing for kids either !
When I got a bit older I started to do some observed trials with a workmate. His fathers land was used each year for the Slemish trial so we'd ride around it trying to get some practise in. I fixed the bike up, sorted the engine a bit better and put on new tyres. It didn't do any good, trials was changing in a big way, the bikes where way better and the sections mostly huge steps. There was a pre '65 class with easier sections for the old British stuff but I couldn't ride in it. Instead I had to take the D line along with all the new monoshock bikes. This usually resulted in either me or the bike getting wrecked, but it was always a fun day out.
Gradually I stopped taking her out and the bike lay in the shed in a pretty forlorn state with a hole in the chain case.
I got the incentive to restore it when in Barcelona one year. I saw some beautiful trials bikes in a moto museum and decided that our old bike should look the same. So on and off over the last couple of years the restoration has been taking place and it now looks like this.
